“When a liberal says it’s time for you to shut up, it usually means they’re losing an argument. When they want you arrested and prosecuted, well….”

– Steven Hayward, “Climatistas Double Down on Stupid,” Power Line, March 29, 2014.

When faced with a powerful, threatening argument to a troubled paradigm, those in denial will first ignore. If this does not work, they will ridicule. And it this does not work, they will shout and even use hateful talk.

“You just don’t get it,” Jeff Skilling would tell Enron’s detractors. Ken Lay, in the middle of his company’s implosion, likened short sellers and media critics to ‘terrorists’ (his last speech to employees was a few months after 9/11). The Enron duo wanted an undeserved peace. They were really saying: “Stop the criticism.…

“As citizens, we need to call on our leaders to make thoughtful choices about where to site industrial-scale development and renewable energy projects, and to create a legacy for our national parks and to public lands everywhere.” – Mark Butler, “Saving the Mojave from the Solar Threat,” Los Angeles Times , March 25, 2014. “‘Soft’ energy sources are horribly land intensive…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.” – Peter Huber, Hard Green; Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 107–108.

Hard-green energies (fossil fuels, uranium) have a major ecological advantage over politically-correct soft energy (wind, solar): less infrastructure requirement, including land. …

“Indeed, a case could be made that politicians have been pushed into a situation such that they have no choice but to approve continued coal-burning, hydro-fracking for increased gas and oil production, and pursuit of oil and gas in extreme and pristine environments.” (James Hansen)

“I am saying that the global energy discussion should be based on facts, not on myths.” (James Hansen)

Yesterday’s post on James Hansen’s new analysis, “Renewable Energy, Nuclear Power and Galileo: Do Scientists Have a Duty to Expose Popular Misconceptions?, discussed how the anti-nuclear, pro-wind strategy of mainstream environmentalism works to increase, not decrease, greenhouse-gas emissions. Such an incredible irony can only be blamed on philosophical fraud, of believing in imaging and emotions rather than reality. [1]

Hansen’s article also speaks energy/political truth to Big Environmentalism in other ways that help steer the energy debate towards realism and away from postmodernism.…

[Editor note: Ronald Coase died last week at age 102 (obits here and here). One of the most important economists of the last century, Coase substituted real-world economics for ‘blackboard economics’ to solve some fundamental questions–and to appreciate market processes in place of government intervention.]

“When economists find that they are unable to analyze what is happening in the real world, they invent an imaginary world which they are capable of handling. It was not a procedure I wanted to follow in the 1930s. It explains why I tried to find the reason for the existence of the firm in factories and offices rather than in the writings of economists, which I irreverently labeled as ‘bilge.’” (Ronald Coase)

MasterResource attempts to comprehend markets and government regulation of markets. Undesigned (market) order is compared and contrasted to imposed (government) disorder.…